Seven Minutes in Arkham
by Twinings
Summary: It doesn't take long to touch a life, even if the only thing you leave behind you is a little fear, a little confusion, and a little grin on a solemn face.


He said his name was Ragdoll. He was my first "special" patient at Arkham. I had a few other patients before that, relatively stable ones. Some of them I actually helped. Most, I didn't, really. That was to be expected, of course—Arkham is not a place one goes into expecting to come out again. But I made it my personal mission to help all my patients as much as I could. I wanted to cure them. I wanted to save them.

I was young and naïve.

I had been allowed to sit in on sessions with the Joker, but they didn't think I was ready to oversee his treatment myself. The same went for Mr. Freeze and Kirk Langstrom.

I liked Dr. Langstrom, actually. We used to talk on our own time. Excellent chess player. I think that's the biggest reason why they didn't give him to me. They didn't want a doctor-patient friendship causing a conflict of interest.

They weren't going to give me Ragdoll, either.

But when they brought him in, our people disregarded the Batman's warnings and restrained him in a straitjacket. Thirty seconds after they left him alone, he had slipped through the bars of his window and was running free across the grounds.

I happened to be getting in my car at the time, and out of the corner of my eye I saw him streak past, running like a jerky marionette. He waved at me. Cheeky little so-and-so.

I was smiling when I tackled him. I think he was smiling, too.

He went down easily, limp as a rag doll, in fact. I am not a large man, but he was so stick-thin I felt like I was crushing him under me. I had to remind myself what he was. (I, at least, had paid attention to the Batman's report.) It was still hard to ignore his cry of pain when I put a knee in his back and pinned his arms.

"Hey, come on! No fair!"

"Sorry," I said. I didn't let up.

"Hey, I tried to escape and you caught me. No harm, no foul, right? I'll go quietly. Just don't hurt me." He sounded _so_ pathetic and scared. He almost had me fooled. Almost.

"I doubt I could hurt you, Ragdoll," I said. He bent his head back at an uncanny angle to look at me with a friendly smile.

"Good point, doc." The fact that he was bending his neck _all the way_ without any pain or nerve damage startled me into letting go of his arms. He bent his elbows backwards and stole my glasses.

"Hey!" I lunged forward to steal them back. The next thing I knew, I was facedown on the asphalt, and Ragdoll was running away.

I may not have caught the guy, but I slowed him down enough for the guards to catch up.

The next day, I found a memo on my desk assigning me to the new patient. I got no explanation, just my orders.

At very short notice, they had remodeled one of the cells for him, covering every possible exit with thick sheets of glass. It was enough to hold him overnight, anyway.

I took my seat inside his cell—they weren't going to let him go anywhere else, knowing now how easily he could escape.

He didn't look too good. I knew our guards could be rough with the prisoners who tried to resist, and Ragdoll was not the cooperative type. They might not have been able to break his bones, but that doesn't mean he couldn't be hurt.

He still smiled when he saw me. Downright peculiar, he was.

"Hi, there." He waved at me. They had put him in another straitjacket, as a formality, and he had allowed it, but apparently his good will didn't extend to keeping it fastened.

"Good morning, Mr. Merkel," I said. "Can I call you Peter?"

"Only if I can call you Jack."

"But that's not my name."

He shrugged, a bizarrely fluid and disjointed motion.

"You look like a Jack."

"I do not. I'm a Eugene at best." That made him giggle, quite madly.

"Well, I'll just stick with Doctor, if you'll stick with Ragdoll." He giggled some more. I did my best to remain serious, but his little grin was just too infectious.

"You can't do this on your terms," I said sternly. He pouted, eyes still twinkling.

"Aww…why not?"

"Because…because…" I couldn't believe he had me so flustered already. Maybe I really wasn't ready. "You're a prisoner here. You're not in a position of power."

"Really?" He tilted his head curiously to the side. Then he tilted it further, a full 180 degrees. I heard things pop that just _shouldn't._ "That's a real shame, Jack."

"Oh, just stick with Doctor, Ragdoll." A big grin spread across his face, and his head slowly rotated another 180 degrees. I felt a little queasy.

"I knew you would be a fun one, Doctor," he said.

"I'm…um…not here to have fun." Against all odds and beyond belief, his head kept on rotating.

"What's the point, if you're not having fun?" He was up out of the chair and standing on one hand before I thought to stop him, not that I could have done much. His whole body continued to rotate, twisting him into impossible shapes. It was fascinating to watch, and sickening.

Focus.

"Is stealing fun for you?"

"Delightful!" He bent his knees…not even backwards, but sideways. "I get to take whatever toys I want, and whenever people see me, the expressions on their faces are just…priceless." He grinned up at me, and I realized he was shaped exactly like a pretzel. "Yes, that's the look." He giggled.

I smiled back. Why not? I was working at Arkham Asylum, for crying out loud. I always had to take everything seriously. I never got to have any fun. I never got to play.

I might have been a psychiatrist (very nearly) but I was still a young man. Besides, what could it hurt to let my patient know how much he amused me?

I would learn better, later.

"Is it all just a game to you, Ragdoll? Aren't you ever serious about anything? Your family, for example?"

He unfolded with a snap and stood there facing me, stiff as a post. He still looked amused.

"The family? How do you know about my family?"

"Well, you do have a police record; a pretty long one for someone who looks as young as you do. I know you have three children, all of them my age or older."

"I have _one_ son," he corrected.

"That's not what your record shows."

"Then my record is broken." He bent over backwards and put his head between his ankles. "Any child of mine would be able to do _this,_ don't you think?"

"Children don't always take after their parents. _My_ father was a construction worker."

"And was he proud to have a Eugene for a son?" Ragdoll asked, forming his body into a wheel and rolling across the floor to me. He popped up in front of me with a silent but obvious "ta-da!"

"I don't know. I never met the guy," I admitted. I refused to let him startle me out of my seat.

"Ran out on you, did he?" He sounded almost sympathetic.

"Yes, but we're here to talk about you." He shrugged again, and I found myself still fascinated by the way he moved. It was…inhuman.

"What about me? You want to know what makes me tick? Why I do the things I do?" He pulled a sad face. "Why I steal? Why I have so much fun doing it with a tee-hee-hee? Why I'm so fresh-faced and young at heart?" He put his hands behind his head, grinned, and wiggled his fingers. "I sold my soul to a demon."

Before I could respond to that, his arm bent in the least logical way you could possibly imagine and wrapped around my neck in a pretty effective chokehold. He wasn't all that strong, but his grip was unbreakable. I was down on one knee and on the verge of blacking out when I stopped trying to fight him. He relaxed his grip just enough for me to breathe, still giving me that friendly smile.

"You didn't call out for help," he said. "Aren't you afraid?"

"Should I be?" (I was. I was on the bare edge of panic, but it wouldn't do me any good to let him know it. I was worried about my job more than my own safety, anyway; Ragdoll was primarily a thief, not a killer.) He laughed at me.

"Well, at least you're not a coward." He moved around behind me (I felt his elbow and shoulder popping into completely new configurations) and twisted my arm behind my back for a little added insurance. "Well, Doctor, you know from experience that nothing much happens when you put pressure on my joints. Do the same to you, though…" He bent my wrist at an angle that would have been nothing to him, and I had a moment of blinding pain before he let me go. "See? Not much fun for someone like you."

"So what do you want? I _won't_ help you escape, and I won't be much use as a hostage. The guards won't be afraid to go through me to get to you."

"Are you sure about that, Doctor?"

"I'm not even really a doctor, not yet. I'm still in school."

"Oh. You're an intern. Well, poo." He shrugged, and yet again I felt things pop unsettlingly. "Still, I'm sure we can work something out. Nothing personal, Jack. It really has been fun." He tightened his grip on my throat again. I wondered for a moment there if he was going to kill me after all. "You know, your father _should_ be proud of you. You have courage…brains…heart…" He giggled. As everything went dark, I heard him singing, "If I Only Had a Brain."

--

I woke up some time later, pretty much unharmed, on the floor of Ragdoll's cell. I was wearing his straitjacket; he had stolen my suit. (My only nice suit. That was going to be fun to replace.) The two guards were lying next to me, both of them out cold.

Ragdoll was long gone.

He went back to his own hometown and kept on doing his thing. He was caught once or twice, but no one ever held him any longer than we had. In a strange sort of way, that made me happy. I guess there always was a part of me that liked to root for the villain.

He did come back to Gotham a few times. I met him again, just once, years later. I wasn't a doctor then, and he certainly wasn't my patient. We didn't continue our conversation. I'm not sure he even remembered me.

I met his son, too, the one who didn't take after him. Quite an oddball, that one. I would have liked to get a chance to talk with him, but it didn't work out that way.

Life can be funny sometimes. You wouldn't think a single, brief conversation with a captured maniac would have affected me all that much, but it did. I still think of him sometimes. I still remember what I learned that day.

There are some things you never forget.

* * *

Disclaimer and such: I first encountered Ragdoll in Villains United, and immediately started pulling my "he needs a hug and a sandwich" routine. And I Did Not Like The Father. But then I learned that Father-Ragdoll was "the" Ragdoll, and I was mildly upset. Then I started watching The Batman and was pleased with that incarnation of Ragdoll, all the while realizing that he must be Ragdoll-the-Father who was Not A Kind Man. What to do? Absolutely nothing, apparently. Although it did occur to me that yet again I have written "A Story In Which Something Nice Happens" in which I manage to do something unpleasant to the Scrawny Villain of the Day. But for once that's very minor. Hardly a bruise worth mentioning, eh? (By the way, "A Story in Which Something Nice Happens" was the working title of "A Night in the Narrows." The same principle was applied to "Night of the Scarecrow" and "Asylum." I think I'm getting better.)

And what does all this babbling mean? It means that I do not own any DC characters or situmuations.

Now, quick, somebody make my day and tell me the doctor's real name!

On this, the day before the day of my birth, October 16, 2006.

-3.0


End file.
